Hello List,
Can anyone recommend some sites regarding building
high-availability
storage networks using centos (or the upstream providers
brand name)?
I need to have approx 2-3 tb of storage available via
iscsi and smb,
but worry about having it all on a single server. Most of the HA articles I'm reading deal with application high
availability, but not
storage.
Check out openfiler?
http://www.openfiler.com/products
For me I would just buy a real storage array, better reliability generally. Though entry level pricing is around $20k.
In some countries those storage arrays are about 3 more
expensive, so
it's cheaper to build it yourself with PC / server components. I'm actually interested in such a setup as well, and would like
to cluster
2x machines to give a network RAID setup. What would you recommend using? The idea is to serve to servers which will be clustered as well, hosting web hosting Virtual Private Servers.
You could use DRBD, if you trust it. AFAIK, Parallels more-or-less supports this. http://wiki.openvz.org/HA_cluster_with_DRBD_and_Heartbeat
I use drbd for database HA for over a year and have never seen any problems. I'm fairly confident it's ability. I know this is a CentOS mailing list, but a couple pizza boxes and a sas shelf that allows 2+ connections using open solaris+zfs may be your cheapest bet (if you trust a single sas box). ZFS lets you export the volumes as iscsi, nfs, and cifs. You can also use their storagetek suite to replicate over two boxes with independent storage.
Patrick